And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in
earth (Matthew 28:18).

To put it briefly, the good guy has already won. If He is Lord of your life, in principle
so have you.

What is the main problem we face? Conspiracies? No. The real problem is
the set of moral, intellectual, and economic ideas that the West's voters have accepted
as valid that have led to their partial enslavement. The conspirators use these false
religious principles to control Western societies. These false principles include the
following:

1. Mankind is essentially unified.

2. There are no conflicting moral issues that divide people permanently.

3. Man must "take control" of man.

4. Mankind will eventually evolve into a "higher species" 
a "leap of being."

5. Elite planners can use the laws of evolution to speed up this
evolutionary process.

6. Men can be saved through State legislation.

7. Men can be saved through education.

8. Ideology is irrelevant; only "interests" count.

9. "Deprived" individuals are not personally responsible for
their acts.

10. The State is the primary welfare agency rather than the family.

11. The State should redistribute wealth to benefit "the
People."

12. The State must protect inefficient producers from free market
competition.

13. The State must supervise education.

14. We need to construct a one-State world in order to achieve peace, freedom, and
prosperity.

When a majority of voters accept a majority of these premises, the
triumph of one or another conspiratorial group is assured. It is by means of these
man-worshipping, State-worshipping ideas that conspirators enlarge the power of civil
government, and it is by the power of civil government that they rule. To attempt to
remove the ruling conspiracies without first removing most people's confidence in these
false ideas is about as useful an effort as a condemned man's switching from hanging to
the firing squad. Jesus described the results of such a self-defeating
"housecleaning":

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry
places, seeking rest, and finding none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from
whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then
goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they
enter in and dwell there .... (Matthew 12:43-45a).

The owner of the house is worse off than he was when he started. This
is the legacy of all political revolutions that are not grounded in biblical principles of
social order. Men "throw the rascals out," only to find that a worse gang of
rascals has replaced the first one.

The Gnostic Heresy

The ancient gnostics believed that man is saved by secret
knowledge. They believed that man needs to be liberated from this world of matter and
elevated, through secret initiation and certain ascetic techniques, into the realm of
spirit. Certain groups of contemporary "New Age" humanists hold a very similar
viewpoint. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Christians and far too many "we must
reveal the conspiracy" fanatics who have adopted a variation of this ancient heresy.
Their "secret initiation" into knowledge about their enemies, whether their
enemy is the devil (in the case of Christian investigators) or the conspiracy (in the case
of radical conservatives or leftists) serves them as a psychological justification for
doing nothing. They think that just knowing more and more about "the Conspiracy"
relieves them from doing anything about it. Their endless studying is an excuse for
their inactivity. They spend their time with other similarly minded people, enjoying the
impotent luxury of exchanging secret phases and knowledge of secret things. They have
imitated their enemies; they have created their own inner ring  a secret ring which
knows all about their enemy's secret ring. They become hypnotized with "circles
within circles." Their great spiritual enemy thereby removes them from the real
fight.

A continuing theme in this book is that we are not saved by knowledge.
We are also not saved by power. We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ as
Lord and Savior, because He was God's substitute sacrifice for sinful men. Christ's
victory over Satan and sin is in principle our personal and corporate victory over Satan
and sin, in every area of life, including politics. Christianity is the dominion religion.
It is not the power religion, nor is it the escape religion.1

The first thing to recognize in this cosmic struggle is that those who
seek power through manipulation or through execution have in principle lost the battle.
They lost it almost 2,000 years ago. They hold power temporarily. Although they are
accomplished power manipulators, power is not the issue; ethics is the issue. God
and His law are the issue. "Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will
remember the name of the LoRD our God" (Psalm 20:7). "The chariots of God are
twenty thousand, even thousands of angels" (Psalm 68:17a).

Our opponents are not supermen. They are not the masters of history.
They are the heads of multinational banks that have more bad loans on their books than
they have equity capital. They are the heads of oil companies that face the possibility of
an oil glut and a collapse of oil prices. They are the people who gave us Jimmy Carter.
They are not so smart. Or better put, they are way too smart for their own good (and
ours). In any case, it isn't a question of brain power; it is a question of ethical
standing before God the Judge.

Second, our opponents believe in the power religion. They have
become skilled at the capture and retention of power. It is their way of life. Thus, they
will not be displaced easily. Reading books about the conspiracy will not displace them.
Voting for their hand-picked Presidential candidates every four years will not displace
them. We will not be delivered by books or Presidential races. We should not place false
hope in programs that are futile, or even self-destructive.

Replacement, Not Simply Exposure

For the sake of argument, let us say that two possibilities lie
ahead. The first is that a group of principled people who are utterly ignorant of the
conspiracy are in a position to replace each conspirator in whatever office or job that is
presently held by conspirators. The second possibility is that this same principled group
can gain almost perfect knowledge about every aspect of the conspiracy, but in doing so,
they use up all of their spare time. Which would you prefer, ignorant victory or
well-informed defeat?

You may respond, "no one can replace the conspirators who does not
know all about them. Knowledge comes first." But does it? What did the people of
Israel know about the gods of Canaan that governed the promised land? Not much. They were
not supposed to know much about them, either; God forbade them from even mentioning the
names of these gods (Exodus 23:13). Nevertheless, God led them to victory over these gods
under Joshua.

What did the Apostles know about Roman law or Roman military tactics?
Not much, but God defeated the Roman Empire and used His people to replace the older Roman
leadership. Christians by the year 325 were the only group left in Rome which was
sufficiently moral and sufficiently productive to take over the administration of the
crumbling Empire. Yet they had been outcasts: persecuted, politically inexperienced
outcasts. All they had was a moral vision. All they had was perseverance. All they had was
God.

It is not knowledge which saves us. What saves us is grace. What saves
a society is the covenantal faithfulness of its people.

Our job is not to "throw the rascals out" in one glorious
national election. Our job is to replace them steadily by our own competence. God did not
promise Moses that the Hebrews would conquer the Canaanites overnight. On the contrary, He
promised to preserve the Canaanites until their day of judgment had come, city by city,
year by year:

I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom
thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee. And I will
send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the
Hittite, from before thee. I will not drive them from before thee in one year; lest the
land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply against thee. By little and
little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou hast increased, and inherit the
land (Exodus 23:27-30).

God promised them victory. He promises us victory, too. But this
victory is a slow, continual process. It is victory through competence. It is victory
through steady, long-term replacement. We need the conspirators to "mind the
land" while we are preparing ourselves for full-time, comprehensive biblical service.
Never forget, we still have essentially a free market society. The conspirators have to
make a living, just as we do. They also have to meet a market. They also have to serve the
consumers in order to make a profit. The West's markets are only partially rigged.
Government-created, government-protected monopolies are only marginally powerful in most
cases. If the conspirators were to go on strike overnight in their capacity as economic
producers, the whole economy would topple.. We are not yet ready to lead, any more than
the Israelites were in Moses' day. It is our job to prepare ourselves for competitive free
market service in every area of life. If we do this, and do it diligently, our victory is
assured. Until we do, a victory would only humiliate us.

What good has a 30-year program of exposure done so far? Hundreds of
anti-conspiracy books were published, 1965-85, yet hardly one of them can be bought at any
book store today, and very few are still in print. They were not suppressed by the
conspirators; they were ignored by them. They were ignored by practically everyone else,
too.

My point is simple: such books are curiosities, not solutions. They
have led in the past to paralysis. Only a positive program of self-conscious Christian
reconstruction can counter the power and influence of the conspirators. Only a
comprehensive program based on good ideas can defeat an entrenched political order based
on universally shared bad ideas. In short, you can't beat something with nothing. You
have to fight something evil with something good.

What Is to Be Done?

This was the question Lenin asked in his famous pamphlet. It had
been asked by Russian revolutionaries for a generation. A counter-offensive is called for.
Not a defensive holding action. Not a retreat into the historical shadows. It must be a bottom-up,
decentralized offensive campaign. The top-down, centralized strategy is the strategy
of our opponents. What we need is a long-term grass roots campaign at every level of
politics, economics, and institutional influence, in every region of the country 
indeed, every region of the world.

This will happen when God's people faithfully begin to sacrifice for a
long-term program of comprehensive redemption.2They
must first assume that when God saves men's hearts, He intends thereby to save every area
of life touched by redeemed men's hearts  every relationship and every institution.
To aim at less is to default to the devil. To grant the devil a single square inch of
legitimate authority is to capitulate in principle to his program. What we need is a
four-fold program:

1. The will to ethics

2. The will to resist

3. The will to self-education

4. The will to dominion

We need to act righteously, whatever the cost, but do so on the basis
of true knowledge, in order to roll back Satan's kingdom of illegitimate power.

There are many books on the conspiracies of this world. What there has
not been is a serious, long-term, multiple level, yet decentralized counter-offensive
against the forces of evil. Conservative organizations have come and gone, but still the
power-brokers remain entrenched in the seats of power. They still make deals with our
mortal enemies. All the paperback exposes since 1961 have done nothing to roll back the
illegitimate profits of the deal-doers. We are not saved by knowledge, nor are they
particularly threatened by it. Paperback books will not dislodge them. A principled,
long-term, ethics-based counter-offensive will dislodge them. Shrink the State!

[Written, remember, in 1985:] I propose a program. Some variant of this
program must be adopted if we are to have any meaningful hope in recapturing the machinery
of civil government, the media, and the educational institutions. It will be done. It has
already begun. How long it will take is problematical; I think we will begin to see major
victories before the year 2005. In two decades, our enemies will begin to feel the
pressure; possibly sooner. They act as though they are on the offensive, but in fact they
are already on the defensive. We need to be prepared to replace them in every area of life
when the spiritual revival comes. This means that we need years of patient hard work in
order to gain the experience we need to lead. There is no quick fix. We need the same kind
of experience that David gained in the years that King Saul pursued him.

What I outline here is only an outline. Many steps are left out, and
almost all the details. But something like this must develop if we are to preserve our
declining freedoms.

Localism

You must start where you are. You must begin to take seriously the
responsibilities God has assigned to you locally. "Think globally, work locally"
is a biblical principle.

Church

Are you a member of a committed church? The "litmus
tests" of serious Christian commitment for a church are twofold:

1. Does it operate (or support) a Christian day school?

2. Is the pastor actively involved in the battle against abortion, including picketing
abortion centers?

If the answer is "no" to both questions, try to get your
church involved in these issues before you go to stage two, your program of
anti-conspiratorial action. These are the first two programs that a church needs in a
first-stage battle against any group of conspirators. If your church refuses to get
involved in either project, find a new church. But do find one. This battle cannot be won
alone. Radical individualism is the counsel of despair. This is a covenantal fight which
will be won by covenantally faithful people. We are up against organized forces.

Let us assume that your church supports a Christian school and is
actively involved in the fight against abortion. You now know who the "doers"
are in the church  the people who are involved in the school and the fight against
abortion. They have identified themselves. This is exactly what you need.

You need to .join a local congregation that is doing something positive
in the community. The church's officers should have a vision for making the community a
better place to live. Maybe it offers marital counselling, or projects that help the poor.
But it should be doing something.3 It should not be sitting in
the sidelines of life waiting for the Rapture.

Family

Are your children enrolled in a private school? If not, stop
worrying about some distant conspiracy. Anyone who gets himself in a dither about
"the conspiracy this" or "the conspiracy that," but has not taken care
to see that his children are in a humanism-free intellectual environment, is using his
interest in the conspiracy deflect him from the important affairs of life. Until you cease
"tithing your children" to the State, you are far too vulnerable to the enemy
for you to begin a counter-offensive against him. You have turned your children's minds
and environment over to the statist enemy. First things first: get them into a Christian
school, or into a home school environment. Look in the Yellow Pages for the telephone
numbers of local Christian schools or churches that operate schools.

If you cannot locate a good school, consider a home school curriculum.
You would be amazed at how much an untrained mother can teach children, especially those
under the sixth grade. There are many available curriculum materials, but two good
programs are these:

Grandparents should offer to help subsidize tuition payments for their
grandchildren. Forget about big annual Christmas expenditures. Buy the kids a few books
each Christmas, and then help finance their attendance at a school which will teach them
how to read them.

Have you seen to it that every teenager in your house has read this
book, and other books on similar topics? What good does it do if your next door neighbor
or some colleague at work reads and believes in this story, but your children go off to
university never having heard anything about it? Are your children involved in summer
reading or summer seminar programs?

A good two-week-long summer educational program for students age 16 or
older is run by Rev. David Noebel. There is also a two-week course held at Bryan College,
Dayton, Tennessee each summer. There are also a dozen one-week regional seminars for
students age 13 and up.

There is also a one-year video program, Understanding the Times, which
is in use in 750 Christian high schools. This parallels Dr. Noebel's book, Understanding
the Times ($36.95).

Politics

The principle of localism is fundamental. It has been the suicidal
urge of political conservatives to focus on the "big issues" at the national
level, where their nearly invisible political opponents have long since mastered the art
of deception. What we need is to develop skills on the local level before we can hope to
defeat our opponents nationally. The county courthouse, the local school board, the city
council: here are our initial targets.4 If we cannot win here,
why should we expect to win nationally? Is it pride which motivates good people with
minimal skills to seek the highest offices first? The biblical principle of authority is
clear: success first in the family, then in the church, then in civil and social affairs.
Success in the little things of life is to precede any attempts to master the big things
of life.

Where should the little person begin? Wherever he has legitimate
responsibility. After he has managed well here, he can begin to think about increasing his
authority. He must resist at all costs a premature grabbing of the robes of authority. That
was Adam's sin. He just wouldn't wait.

Here is my recommended initial program of self-improvement. It must
precede other "more impressive" programs of political reconstruction.

6. Continual monitoring of local elected representatives and board
meetings

7. Continual monitoring of public school curriculum materials

8. Identifying local supporters or potential supporters on an
issue-by-issue basis

9. Building a mailing list on an issue-by-issue basis

What kind of skills are involved? First and foremost, the skills of
long-term commitment and permanent self-discipline. Only a minority of people possess such
skills. This is why minorities always rule. This is why all institutions require
representative government.

Second, there must be organizational skills. This may only be a
willingness to put together a shoebox filing system that uses 3 by 5 inch note cards. It
probably involves a willingness to buy an IBM PC clone with a gigabyte of hard disk and an
introductory data base program, such as Claris Works or Lotus Approach. Claris Works has a
very good word processing program and a spreadsheet built in. It is an all-in-one package.
(So is Microsoft Works, but I like Claris Works better.)

Third, there must be personal communication skills. Any motivation and
education program requires people who can speak to others face to face, hand out a
newsletter, present a petition, invite to a meeting, etc. These may not be the organizers
or the public speakers, but they are vital.

At the national level, two training programs stand out, the first for
political candidates and campaign managers, and the second for college students.

These political projects involve very specialized skills. Such skills
are seldom possessed by any one person. A cooperative effort is called for. In short,
Christian reconstruction necessarily involves covenants: family, church, and civil.5 Success cannot come on the basis of pure individualism.

Study Groups

You have read this book. You are convinced that something needs to
be done. You may not be certain just what needs to be done, but you understand that the
church needs to get involved. But what if your pastor is unaware of the material in this
book? Give him a copy and ask him to evaluate it. See what he thinks. He may never have
heard of any of this before.

On the other hand, he may know more about it than he lets on. He may
know enough not to want to get involved. Almost no pastor ever wants to deal with these
issues from the pulpit. It is risky. He may alienate some church members. If he were to
preach about the problem, it would also require him to come up with concrete, biblical
answers to the problems raised by this book. Very few pastors believe that the Bible
really and truly speaks specifically to modern social, political, and economic
questions. (Example: ask your pastor what the biblical criticism of the Federal Reserve
System is. There is one.6 Does he know what the answer is?
Does he even know what the Federal Reserve System is? This is not the sort of question
that most pastors seek answers to in the Bible.)

Furthermore, most pastors hold a pessimistic view of the future. They
believe that Christian people will not be able to reverse the world's slide into chaos.
They do not believe that God has a program of comprehensive redemption which is going to
become visible across the earth before Jesus returns physically and ends history at
the final judgment. Such an era of victory is what the Bible teaches.7
Not many pastors believe this, however. Since they think Christians cannot win, they
hesitate to get involved in a long-term battle against political evil. Why get involved in
a losing cause? They prefer to stay on the sidelines. It is safer to preach other kinds of
sermons.

What can you do about this? Not much. You can set up a quiet study
group for church members. I have outlined how students can do this on campus. You can
imitate it. I include this very practical section in my highly controversial little
paperback book, 75 Bible Questions Your Instructors Pray You Won't Ask: How to Spot
Humanism in the Classroom or Pulpit. You can order a copy for $5.95, plus a dollar
for postage, from

Institute for Christian Economics
P O. Box 8000
Tyler, TX 75711

To say that 75 Bible Questions is controversial is an
understatement. Pastors do not want their members reading such material. What if your
pastor tells you to stop having study groups? You may choose to stop them, but you can
still hand out copies of Conspiracy: A Biblical View  not to everyone (most
people aren't ready for it), but to interested people. Let word of mouth tell the story.
You need not become very visible if you choose not to.

You need to show considerable judgment in who you invite to investigate
the problem of conspiracy. If someone in your church were dying of an incurable disease,
would you rush to him and hand him a copy of this book? Is that what he needs at this
point? Or what if there is some young couple which is having deep marital troubles. What
if they are talking about divorce? Is their highest priority item a knowledge of
conspiracies? What of the new convert, or the mentally disturbed person who is suffering
from depression? Is that the person you are trying to recruit?

No, what you need is a stable person, someone who is in a position to
take a leadership position some day. This is the kind of person that the conspirators try
to recruit. So should you. You need a person who reads, votes, donates his time and money
to charities, takes his kids on vacation each year, and generally is a credit to God's
kingdom. You should not be trying to recruit the walking wounded, the spiritual basket
cases who wind up in the church. You need to be highly selective in recruiting people to
the cause.

You need self-evaluation, too. Are you perceived as a "red
hot"? Are you perceived as a loose loaded cannon rattling around on the deck? Are you
noted for your temporary commitment to this or that cause to "save the world"
 causes that usually fail, and which have yet to save the world? If so,
you are a liability in the battle against conspiracies. Stay on the sidelines in this
fight. Get involved in some other cause, such as bake sales or visiting the old folks
home. You have to demonstrate that you are a worthy follower before anyone is going to
believe that you are a potential leader. You need to "wait tables" for a few
years, the way deacons should before becoming elders (Acts 6:2).

Conclusion

As anyone can see, there is a great deal to be done. There is
therefore a great deal that anyone can do at several levels. Anyone who asks rhetorically,
"But what can I do?" now has some very specific answers. This rhetorical
question is not to become an excuse for inaction. If you do nothing now, you have no
excuse.

Do I expect a flood of thousands of letters from dedicated people
who have decided to get involved in one or more of the projects I have listed in this
chapter? Of course not. Not one person in a hundred, if that, will respond by letter. But
perhaps five or six per hundred who read this book will begin to do something, even though
they never identify themselves by letter. Maybe a few hundred churches will at least begin
to get involved in stage two, the stage beyond the Christian school fight and the abortion
fight. If there is no response to the conspiracy's challenge, then the Spirit of God will
pass over this generation just as surely as He passed over Moses' generation, which died
in the wilderness. But if just a handful respond in our day, and adopt a vision of
victory, then we will be as Joshua's generation: victorious on all fronts. God chooses the
foolish of this world to confound the wise (I Corinthians 1:20). Gideon's experience
proves that it only takes a handful of dedicated righteous people to achieve a victory.

So what about you? What will you do? At the very least, begin to
monitor at least one of the special-interest groups of self-anointed elite planners. The
Appendix gives you the names and addresses of several. Get on some mailing lists and see
what they are up to. Find out who they are, too. Know your enemy. And then discipline
yourself to become sufficiently efficient to replace him, at least at the local level.

4 The goal of
controlling the local public school board is not to make the public schools a good place
for Christian students. Christian students should not be in tax-supported schools. The
goal is to say "no" to every request by every teachers union, to say
"no" to every liberal humanist textbook salesman, and to stop floating school
bond proposals. The school board's job is to cut back on spending in every area, but
especially the salaries of school administrators. It is also important to expel every
delinquent on campus, including faculty members.